The article for this week brought up an excellent point that I myself sometimes ponder and I KNOW that many people ponder when thinking about ESL classes: "How do I support a student's first language when I don't speak the language?" My own mother always asked me how I was going to teach ESL in the future. "Don't you have to speak all of the different languages that they speak?" Well, luckily I will be able to use my Spanish occasionally in an ESL classroom as there are likely to be Spanish-speakers, but there will no doubt be many more languages that the students speak.
I loved the backdrop that the author presented of Dolores, the teacher in an ESL classroom of speakers of many different languages, including Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish, Khmer, and Lao. She describes a classroom "project," if you will, where each student is responsible for being the language teacher for a week and teaches the rest of the class three phrases. The students are encouraged to use the words they have learned throughout the year when interacting with others. "Please" and "Thank you" are the main phrases the children learn. I think this is a great way to communicate the value of other languages and a student's home language in the classroom. Because it is not obviously possible to vary your instruction and use each of the student's home languages, this is a happy medium where the students can be exposed to different languages and, in my opinion, feel that they are in a multicultural-appreciative environment when in the classroom. In my practicum experience, I am lucky enough to be able to see the teacher using student's home languages in instruction, but this is because (at the basic level) there are only three students in the class and they all speak Spanish. The teachers use Spanish occasionally to clarify directions or to chat about non-school-related things.
Chapters 18 and 20 of the anthology discussed how to build discussion skills and factors to consider when developing adult EFL students' speaking abilities. First of all, I liked that this chapter specifically focused on adult EFL students--much of the research I was looking at before, although excellent, did not specify a context or age group that the theory is supposed to take place in, and therefore confused me about the plausibility of the methods. (For example, is it really possible to apply a humanistic approach to language teaching when your group of students are six years old?) One point that chapter 18 brought up was that sociocultural factors can play a huge role in oral communication. The video we watched in class touched on this a bit, although it had more to do with writing: an Asian student, when writing a paper, did not incorporate outside sources into her paper because she was taught in her home country that deviating from what they had learned was not good. Cultural practices can affect speech to a very high degree as well--from the degree of imposing on another person that is felt to be allowed to the frequency and meaning of nonverbal gestures. In addition, the specificity of things may come off differently to different cultures: the chapter gives the example of a Chinese student, when being told by another student that they should get lunch sometime, trying to come up with an exact date that they could and receiving a puzzled look. This reminds me of the very American way of saying "Hi, how are you?" or something similar when talking to a person as a very informal communication--one doesn't actually intend to know how the person is doing, and an extended reply would surprise the questioner.
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